Lecture by: John T. Johnson, Professor, San Francisco State University Jounalism Department

Discussant: William Drummond, Professor, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

The digital revolution has spawned the third great era in how humanity records, stores, retrieves, analyzes and communicates data and information. The sudden availability of digital hardware, software and publicly accessible data is demanding that journalists and all social scientists look at the world and its phenomena with new information-and knowledge-making tools. Geographic Information Systems (Science?) is one of the most powerful of those new tools. Its potential suggests coming intellectual and conceptual changes far beyond fast maps and easy driving directions, changes that could dramatically modify journalism and even democracy itself.